This is a repository copy of Responses.
White Rose Research Online URL for this paper:
http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/84719/
Version: Accepted Version
Article:
Steward, H (2013) Responses. Inquiry: an interdisciplinary journal of philosophy, 56 (6).
681 - 706. ISSN 0020-174X
https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2013.841055
[email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/
Reuse
Unless indicated otherwise, fulltext items are protected by copyright with all rights reserved. The copyright exception in section 29 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 allows the making of a single copy solely for the purpose of non-commercial research or private study within the limits of fair dealing. The publisher or other rights-holder may allow further reproduction and re-use of this version - refer to the White Rose Research Online record for this item. Where records identify the publisher as the copyright holder, users can verify any specific terms of use on the publisher’s website.
Takedown
If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by
Response to Karin Boxer
I want to begin my response to Karin’s thought-provoking paper by simply conceding (as I
have already conceded to some other authors) that she is quite right to say that there is too
much focus in A Metaphysicson one particular type of compatibilism, and that I say rather
too little about some of the other types that might be conceivable. I think perhaps my
concentration on the reductive style of compatibilism which I attempt most directly to
undermine – the kind which conceives of the determination of effects by agents as reducible
to the determination of those same effects by events and states occurring or obtaining in
those agents – was a result of the fact that this seemed to me to be the type of compatibilist
thinking about agency that most dominated the literature I was particularly concerned to
oppose – a literature in which various familiar forms of physicalism and functionalism are the
favoured accounts of mental causation. But of course, Karin is right to say that
compatibilism, no less than incompatibilism, comes in many forms, and that I have not said
enough about some of the alternatives to the reductive types of view I oppose directly. In this
response, then, I shall try to make a few remarks about the sort of compatibilism which Karin
herself suggests might replace the reductive form I criticise – and attempt to argue that
contra Karin, my argument does indeed have force against this proposed alternative. The
second thing I shall try to do is to seize a welcome opportunity to correct a misapprehension
about the view of settling to which I am committed –and in particular, to deny Karin’s
suggestion that, on my account ‘settling begins wherereasons end’ (p. ?).
Karin’s favoured form of compatibilism answers the question what it is to have the power to
make one’s body move in certain ways ‘at will’ in terms of a power to make one’s body move
in those ways as and when one wills to move it in those ways. To avoid the perils of
volitionalism, it is then specified that willing is neither a purely mental phenomenon, nor one
that takes place prior to the action itself. Rather, willing is to be explicated in terms of trying.
When trying is successful, the trying is simply identical with the action, rather than being its
prior cause. But if willing is to be explicated by means of trying, it is surely permissible and
was originally focused on the concept of agency – indeed, it is an instance of the
phenomenon, as Karin herself agrees; she says that trying is ‘intrinsically active’ (p.?). But
this seems to mean that we now need to ask the question whether our tryings are the sorts
of things that could be deterministically produced events, if we want to know whether
compatibilism is true – and the compatibilist can hardly reapply her original strategy in order
to show that there is no problem about understanding what it is for a trying to be dependent
on an agent’s will –we can’t say, for example, that to have the power to try is to have the
power to try as and when one tries to try. For trying is not generally something one can try to
do.
This does not show, of course, that a trying could not be deterministically produced. But if a
trying simply is an action – a full-blown physical action, when successful, and something less
– perhaps the causing of some incipient muscular or neural motion – when not successful –
it would seem as though anything that stood in the way of an action’s being determined
would likewise stand in the way of a trying’s being determined. And so, contra Karin, I
believe my original Chapter 2 argument remains relevant. If actions have to be settlings of
certain matters at the time of action, then tryings have to be settlings of certain matters at the
time of action, too. And that means that at least some matters have to be left to be settled by
the trying. A wholly deterministic account of their provenance cannot be correct.
Karin might, of course, mean simply to question the premise of this argument – the premise
that actions (including tryings) are settlings. The fact that she asks the question why
compatibilists should attempt to explicate agency in terms of settling at all suggests as much.
But I made the claim that actions are settlings as a way of explicating what I took to be a
common intuition about agency - that when an agent acts, certain matters are always up to
the agent at the time of action. If a compatibilist is to reject the idea that this intuition should
be explicated in this way, she needs to offer us a different way of understanding this intuition,
one which is compatible with determinism of at least a local sort. The most common
recourse of the compatibilist at this point is to a reductive account of ‘up-to-usness’ in terms
of causation by mental states. Karin is right to point out that that may not be the only
possible alternative. But the strategy she herself offers, it seems to me, will not give us this
in terms of which it is possible to understand what it might mean to say that whether or not to
try to do something is very often up to us – and without it, we are left, effectively, without a
viable compatibilism.
The second thing I would like to do in this response is to correct what I think is a mistaken
interpretation of my views about what it is that agents are able to settle. Karin seems to
believe that it is my view that agents are able only to settle details concerning the
movements of their own bodies – whether for example, they move their bodies at t rather
than at t + 1, or whether they move first to the left and then to the right, or vice versa, etc. –
and that where reasons and intentions dictate what is done, there is no agential settling. But
this is absolutely not my view. Most of the time, I want to say, we are settling what we will do,
and not merely when or how (in detail) we will do it. I emphasise our capacity to settle the
small details only to make clear that even in those (rare) cases in which our reasons make a
single course of action mandatory, there remain many things which are up to us – in
particular, when to act – and when even this is dictated by our reasons, how to act (in detail).
But it is extremely rare, in my view, that reasons will dictate a single course of action. Most of
the time, it seems to me, reasons quite vastly underdetermine what one ought (at this very
moment) to do or be doing. I currently have reasons for finishing this response, reasons for
going for a swim, reasons for trying to get in touch with my daughter, reasons for reading the
paper, reasons for tidying up – and perhaps more radically, reasons to reassess my life
entirely, to stop doing philosophy immediately and begin planning a complete change of
direction. Perhaps some of these reasons are stronger than others, but why suppose that
they can be precisely ordered in such a way that at any given time, one single course of
action is at the top of the list, so far as practical rationality is concerned? Any such rational
ordering one could supply would in most cases be at best exceedingly partial. So it is
emphatically not my view that settling only begins where reasons end. Settling only begins
where reasons fail to dictate a unique course of action – but that, in my view, is nearly
everywhere. Settling therefore does indeed have the kind of scope which Karin insists it must
have – we settle which actions occur under the descriptions folk psychology would offer up –
I want, finally, to say something very brief about Karin’s suggestion that ‘laws of character’ in
combination with individual circumstances, might conceivably determine what one does.
Perhaps there are regularities which might be called ‘laws of character’ – but they would
seem to be related rather differently to me and my actions than the laws of physics, say,
might be. For it would seem to be precisely through my settlings of things that it is
determined what they are. In this respect, they seem different from the laws of physics,
where it seems natural to think that they have been as they have for millions of years and
that I have no chance whatever of affecting them. I therefore agree with Karin that there is no
obstacle to viewing choices as things which are determined by conjunctions of
circumstances and laws of character – but that is because it is natural to think of the laws in
question as emerging out of my activity in the first place. Were they written in stone in
advance of my birth, and were they to dictate what I would do in every circumstance in which
I might find myself, I do not see how they would permit me to settle anything at the time of
action – and hence, I do not see how they would permit me agency. (I return to these themes
